Yesterday, I saw my best friend sitting next to the love of her life. I've heard of their relationship in one form or another for nearly ten years, and yet have never seen them together. Unfortunately, it wasn't in person, but electronically through Skype. But even then, I felt this calmness, this content for several hours after hanging up. It felt so right, to see her smiling at his side, playing with her hair in the middle of a conversation at his side, looking over at him. She's a confident woman. At times, annoyingly confident. It almost feels like I've known her all this time, but have only just seen her, in all her vulnerability, overcome by love. I wonder if she realizes how much more this suits her. I never imagined that I wouldn't be able to be a part of her wedding. I feel like I've written this line a hundred times, because I've thought it over so many times. There are a handful of people who you always imagine seeing on their wedding day. She's one of them.

I just coined a word for my dissertation--giantism. To mean the 'identity' of a community of giants. Yes, that is JUST how cool my major is.

Spin

Spin me
     so my colors blur
     and you mistake my legs for my arms
     my face for my brown hair died blonde
Tighten me into a ball of yarn
     somewhere rural, and foreign and unknown
     where one man's roof is the other's front yard
     leave me at the doorsteps of an old lady’s home
Where she can knit me in a jumper, a pair of tiny socks, a hat, a cover
     she can drape over her worn out legs
     or over a teapot for tea faster brewed.
Don’t let me unravel
            this time
            and form only borders
            empty spaces.

To put it lightly, graduate school takes your confidence and blows it out of its nose. I’ve realized just how thick-skinned you have to become to make it out of graduate school unscathed. I had a bit of an emotional breakdown this term, because I just realized that my work was no longer just ‘work’, and was beginning to define me too much. Life is strange, because in the week following my emotional breakdown, I was faced with so many strange situations. It was as if the universe took a week off to give me perspective. One of those odd occurrences from this week was that my friend randomly gave me a canvas, a paintbrush and four bottles of acrylic paint. We’ve never spoken of painting before. In fact, I don’t paint. I’ve never painted. I’ve never even held a paintbrush in my adult life. But I’ve started painting, and I love it, not because I feel like I can paint, but because it puts my head and body in a different place. I like the feel of paintbrush on canvas. It’s gentle. It’s quiet. And its reminded me, more than anything, of why I love writing. Writing in graduate school has been so loud and so fierce—the constant tap-tap on the keys in this laptop have begun to sound like a teacher thrashing a ruler against a desk, reminding me of how far behind I am, and where I need to be. But I’ve begun to see (again) the soul of writing in painting. Writing is gentle. It’s a whisper. Every letter a detail in a landscape. I don’t think there’s anything quite as beautiful.

In the sheer silence of the library, I’m often overtaken with this rush of feeling to hug people I see studying. Not people I know. Not people I’ve met. Not even people who are aware of themselves. No, I feel like wrapping my arms around people who are focused in a book, so lost in what they’re doing, that I can see, I can feel that there’s something surrounding them, that’s taken them away from where they are. I want to feel their warmth, that warmth that comes from a place, removed from here, a warmth coming from the pages of a world only they can read.

They remind me of preening birds. No, they remind me most of kids at Golestan Preschool. Those five year olds in my class who held pens and lost themselves in the blank page, so lost that what came out of the pen was not ink, but parts of themselves. They were in that pen, and they’d built a world around themselves that I couldn’t see, but that they’d try so hard to explain:

“We’re on a train, See! I’m riding a lion!” he’d say, after the bubble of imagination snapped, and he’d come to, and I wished I wasn’t there so that he could stay there, so that he wouldn’t feel the need to come back.

They come so rarely--times when adults look and act like a kids, unaware, consumed by a place they’ve created.

In the Margins of a Research Book...

"Ancrene Wisse, a well-known and lavishly praised but little studied religious work of the early thirteenth century."

A boy (I'm assuming off handwriting) has underlined "little studied" and then in the righthand margin written, "Maybe in California dear but not in Oxford."

Directly above it, someone has written in black in with an arrow pointing to the comment, "Prick"

Directly above that, in pencil, with an arrow pointing to "Prick," someone's written "The prick is right."

Then below the main comment:

Directly below, in blue ink "Ugly arrogance."

Then below that, in pencil, with an arrow pointing up towards the main comment, "But it's quite funny."

Part of some amazing photos I read about in an essay on the medieval practice of 'reading'. Isn't it interesting that, in the second image, rather than look at Mary with the baby, the young woman is flipping through a book, with her fingers between pages?